Stamp Collecting with GS

A Silent Cover Story

Besides stamps, my other fascination is the American silent movie era of the 1920's, and one day I came across an envelope that brought these two things together.

The small, three by five, plain white envelope was postmarked at Hilo, Hawaii, on Nov. 11, 1920, with postage paid A Silent Cover Story for with a common two-cent carmine Washington definitive (#528, A140, Type Va, 11 perf). In just about every way it was a common cover, but immediately I took notice of the address.

It was addressed to a "Lila Lee" in New York and then forwarded to another address in Hollywood. The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that this simple envelope had a story to tell.

Lila Lee

Lila Lee was a Silent Era movie star who appeared in 74 films. Her long career spanned vaudeville, silent films and pre-war Hollywood.

Born Augusta Appel in Union Hill, NY, on July 25, 1901 into a vaudevillian family, Lila began singing and dancing on stage at a very young age and by the time she was 13 she was on Broadway performing in her well-know role as "Cuddles."

Lila made her silent screen debut in 1918 with "The Cruise of the Make-Believe." During her career, Lila mainly played supporting roles and was usually cast as a mother, sister or wife. Though she was not considered a top-shelf star, she was easily one of the most recognizeable faces on the silver screen.

Her best-known role came in 1922 when she played Valentino's suffering wife Carmen in "Blood and Sand," and her career continued when Pictures learned to talk. Her other notable roles were in "Country Gentlemen" ('36), "Unholy Three" with Lon Chaney, Jr. ('30) and "Flight" with director Frank Capra ('29).

In 1936 Lila Lee retired from 19 years in the movies and went back to Broadway. She reportedly suffered from periodic bouts of tuberculosis and in 1973 she passed away at age 72 in Saranac Lake, NY.

Lila Lee's life appeared in a book and was dramatized for the stage by her son Jack Kirkwood, Jr., in "There Must Be A Pony." (He, himself, is best known for winning a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his libretto for "A Chorus Line," the long-running Broadway musical.)

Male and Female

Lila Lee's first important role was in the 1919, 9-reeler "Male and Female." Gloria Swanson plays haughty Lady Lasenby, and Lila Lee is Tweeny, the young scullery maid, who's secretly in love with the butler. They are all shipwrecked on a deserted island along with the butler and several other upper class sorts.

The movie's a romantic fantasy of forbidden love between the Lady and the butler. The barriers between the upper-lower classes, male-female, break down, but are quickly repaired when they're rescued. The Lady marries a Lord, and the butler finally realizes that Tweeny is his true love. He and Tweeny marry and live in bliss on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains.

The movie was a great hit and was notable for a scene in which a real-life lion lies on top of Swanson and roars.

Now, back to our Hilo cover of 1920.

The Studio

Lasky Studios opened their Hollywood studio at the corner of Selma and Vine in 1913, and three years later Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky formed Famous Players- A Silent Cover Story Lasky. Years later in '27 they moved the studio, and the site became a miniature golf course.

In 1920 Lila's studio was an empire with a near-monopoly on movie production, distribution and exhibition. Well-known studios like Paramount and Real-Art were controlled by Zukor and Lasky, and together they owned nearly a third of all the movie theaters in the US.

Throughout the 1920's the Federal Trade Commission investigationed the studio and finally ordered Zukor and Lasky to cease and desist from their anti-trust and fair trade violations in 1927.

Hilo, Hawaii

In the 1920's the Hawaiian Islands were a sparsely populated American territory of only about a hundred thousand people, and Hilo was a small rainy city of black sand beaches on the Big Island's.

Sugar was the business of Hilo. It processed and refined sugar cane from the huge plantations that then dominated the northern coast of the island and shipped it out of Hilo Bay.

Today Hilo is the southern-most city in the United States, the home of 40-some thousand people, and is better known for its orchids and lush gardens.

The Gaiety Theatre

Back in the early '20's films were sent by distributors to theaters along a circuit. Big picture palaces in big cities with big audiences were first in line to get the new Pictures. Little theaters in remote places were far done the chain and they had to wait months and months before the movie was sent to them.

Back in 1920 Hilo had two movie theaters, and Lila's fan probably saw her films at The Gaiety, which was owned by Adam Baker, the son of the last Royal Governor of the Island of Hawaii.

The Gaiety Theater operated from the early 1900's until 1925 on Kamehameha Avenue and ran mostly American films. The other theater in Hilo was the Empire, which operated from 1920 to 1940 and specialized in cowboy movies.

Nov 11, 1920

Curiously my letter to Lila Lee was postmarked on "NOV 11," which is Veterans Day in the US when all post offices are closed in commemoration, and 1920 was the last year for such a dated-postark because on 5 November 1921 President Warren G. Harding declared "Armistice Day" a legal holiday.

Fan Letter

The letter was addressed to Lila Lee at Famous Players Lasky on Fifth Avenue in New York. She'd recently moved west to the studio's outpost in Hollywood, and a Lasky clerk simply crossed out the address and applied a purple forwarding address stamp that read, "1520 Vine Street/ Hollywood/ California.

More than likely the envelope contained a simple fan letter from an Hawaiian admirer to one of America's sweethearts of the silent screen. The envelope was slit neatly open across the top, and there are no marks or any indictation of what was inside.

Perhaps

On a rainy Wednesday evening in November a young woman left The Gaiety Theatre, where she'd just seen "Male and Female." She walked down Kamehameha Avenue toward her home down by the Wailuku River, and later that night as the rain stopped, she wrote a letter to the actress she had seen at The Gaiety, the maid called Tweeny.

What she wrote we can't be sure, but a young woman in a small tropical town at the edge of the world may have seen something of herself on the screen that night.

The next day, she walked up to the post office and bought a stamp. After she stuck it on the envelope, she handed her letter to the counter clerk. He smiled, and she walked out of the post office. It was 2:30.

The clerk glanced at the address on her envelope, canceled the stamp and tossed the letter into the outgoing mail bag.

Outside the sky was gray and seas were running rough, and she turned at the corner.

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